This is the age of social media, cyber communities and online research. The majority of these services are available to us for the low cost of a monthly internet fee and tolerating the occasional blinking advertisement on the side of the page we are accessing. With new frontiers there are opportunities for new crimes: digital piracy, copyright infringement, identity theft. Like crime that happens in the physical world, many of us can avoid being victimized by staying in the right neighborhood and acknowledging that most things that are too good to be true, are in fact not true. This applies to pop up ads that tell us that we are winners or that they can remedy our endowment insecurities for the low price of $4.99 a month. The toll I am concerned with is the intellectual toll that we pay the forum trolls whenever we go searching for information.
A forum troll (n) or trolling (v) is a person or act with the sole purpose of adding conflict to an issue or to garner the poster attention that is typically lacking from their unimpressive social or family lives. The sheer size and often anonymity of the internet lends the troll all the safety they need to freely spew vile rhetoric, racial slurs or whatever else they feel they need to do in order to elicit a response to their post. When responded to, even if the response is completely lacking in hostility, you can expect a reply along the lines of, “UMAD BRO?!?!”or, “LAWL.”
These social deviants are protected by forums that allow users to post without providing accurate contact information. Of course, their words are protected by the first amendment. Anyone is free to say whatever they please. The issue at hand is not a legal one; rather it is a matter of ethical consideration. How many of these people would actually write this filth if their REAL name and photo were sitting right there next to their post? Should we really have to pay the toll of sifting through an immeasurable volume of baseless mental diarrhea to access a real intellectual debate on a forum? Debate is the cornerstone of our whole political and legal system. It is one of the things that make this country great. Would you willingly sit through a presidential debate if one of the candidates were wearing a paper bag over their head with a happy face drawn on it?
Why don’t the forum moderators put a stop to it? The answer is money. Let’ say you are looking for a forum debate regarding Pro-life vs. Pro-choice. The forum thread is 18 pages long. Every other post is some nut with a screen name like, “I8urb4by”who is adding nothing but off topic quotes about porn and making fun of dead babies. However, the actual discussion is insightful and thought provoking. So you are resigned to navigating through 18 pages of a thread that only has 9 pages of information you want. Every time you load a new page of the thread, 4 side bar advertisements load. Every advertisement gives the people running the forum a nickel. By not removing the troll’s posts, the forum has made $3.60 off of your time instead of $1.80.
There are several ways to combat this phenomenon. The easiest and least committal would be to never respond to a troll’s post. “Feeding” the trolls is the most direct way to add to their sense of power and ensure that they will continue posting. A more drastic and time consuming method is to only visit forums with a thorough application process and extremely active moderators. The latter will most assuredly limit the quantity of material you have at your disposal, but it will inevitably increase the quality.
No comments:
Post a Comment